Lindsay Blackett, Alberta’s culture minister, outraged film industry unions last week when he told the CBC he would like to have more oversight into what kind of movies receive funding from the Alberta Film Development Fund.

The fund is fed from provincial lottery revenues and has been used as an incentive for filmmakers to use Alberta locations and crews in the filming of their movies. In the past, it has provided funds to movies big and small — most notably, such recent blockbusters as Passchendaele and Brokeback Mountain.

The controversy began last Thursday when a CBC reporter asked Blackett about Downstream, by American filmmaker Leslie Iwerks. Money from the fund was used for its production. The documentary paints a portrait of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, as a community that has been ravaged by a spike in various forms of cancers. It follows the work of Dr. John O’Connor, a physician who attributes illnesses in the remote Alberta community to the contamination of the Athabasca River and Lake Athabasca by bitumen processors in Alberta’s multi billion-dollar oilsands projects.

Blackett told the CBC he was considering creating additional oversight mechanisms to avoid using Alberta government funds to finance movies critical of the province. “Because if I’m going to actually invest money on behalf of Albertans into a film, the whole idea is to show Alberta in a better light, to create an economic diversification to help them, so anything that’s going to be negative is only going to be a negative impetus on this province,” he said.

The statement came just three months after the federal government withdrew its Bill C-10, which would have given the federal government the ability to deny funding to films that it deemed “contrary to public policy.” The bill, which was seen by many as an exercise in censorship, collapsed under the weight of public and industry pressure in October.

Members of the Alberta chapters of both the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employes [sic] (IATSE), organizations that protested Bill C-10 heavily, have decried Blackett’s statements. They say that such oversights to the fund could hurt production in the province and cost their members work.

In a brief interview with Fast Forward, Blackett flatly denied any intention of engaging in censorship or adding any new oversight to the Alberta Film Development Fund. “There is no intention of heading in that direction,” he says. “I didn’t even know about this movie until that reporter asked the question, and my responses were taken out of context.”

Blackett maintains that his ministry’s goal is to increase production of television and film in Alberta, not to do anything to deter its growth. “Everything we’ve done has been to help the industry, not hinder it.... These stories get written, but nobody prints that we raised the funding cap [for individual projects] from $1 million to $3 million, or that we expanded the fund’s endowment from $20 million to $34 million and allowed films to use the funding as part of their financing package. Nobody prints that.”

He denies that either Downstream or the public funding that it received have even been on the government’s radar or that of the Alberta oil industry. “They said in the story that we’d discussed it or talked about it, but we hadn’t talked about anything, because it wasn’t an issue. Nobody in the oil industry has contacted me on it either.”

In the wake of Blackett’s clarifications, the industry is “standing down” and is willing to accept a detente, according to a union source who spoke to Fast Forward on the condition of anonymity. “It’s not quite a retraction, but it helps.”

However, Blackett’s remarks also drew fire from sectors outside of the film industry. The story featured in Downstream is important to the people of Fort Chipewyan, says Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation tribal council member Lorraine Mercredi. “We’re tied to the land. What happens to the land happens to us.”

She says the story might not have been told without the Alberta Film Development Fund. Asked how she would feel about this, she simply says, “We don’t have a lot of resources up here. We need all the help we can get.”

“[T]he Culture Minister is not supporting the general public of Fort Chipewyan,” she says. “We pay our taxes, too.”

Blackett insists that not only will there be no new oversight policies for the fund, but that all Albertan stories that can be told, will be.